and admits he lost. "I don't mind people
moving to Colorado," says the Wisconsin
native. "The question is, how do we accom
modate them? With suburb after mindless
suburb?
"I've seen Denver metastasize all the
way up to Boulder and increasingly down
to Colorado Springs. We're growing a Los
Angeles of the Rockies right here, an endless
strip city, and we're doing it knowingly!
Knowingly!"
The "knowinglys" explode like land mines
on the desk under his fist, and the shrapnel
finds me. I am one of those newcomers, as
are more than half the people quoted in this
story. Many of us came to Colorado seeking
mountains, open space, clean air, blue sky. I
didn't give much thought to the indispensable
element-water.
FIRST LESSON for transplants is that wa
ter is wealth; the Front Range receives
only about 14 inches of precipitation a
year. John Afshar, a fireman, and his
family woke up one winter morning in
1987 in their home in Braley Acres, south of
Chatfield Reservoir in Douglas County, to
discover that his account was overdrawn-
his well had dried up.
With no water, he had no heat from his
gas-fired water-heating system. His breath
condensed and froze on his mustache. His
wife Lisa's eyelashes froze. Afshar began
schlepping five-gallon buckets in his pickup
from taps at the reservoir. In the morning
the family had to break ice in the buckets.
"It was the winter from hell," his mother,
Valerie, remembers.
Afshar spent $15,000 drilling a new well,
National Geographic, November 1996